Christianity and Sin (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III IN THE PRIESTLY CODE AND THE LATER OLD TESTAMENT BOOKS Between the period chiefly studied in our last chapter and the post-exile law more than one great factor intervenes. First we should mention the reaction in the age of Manasseh towards heathenism of a gloomy type, with a development or revival of terrible rites. While the prophetic party was in the strongest possible antagonism to the new heathenism, yet we ought to allow for unconscious influences emerging from the hated rival and diffusing gloom. But more important than anything in Manasseh's age was the tremendous fact of exile. The threatenings of the prophets had at length been completely fulfilled. A third great influence was the personality of the priest- prophet Ezekiel. His great older contemporary, Jeremiah, was a priest too by birth; but he was not like Ezekiel a priest by his instincts. It has been thought by some that a priest and a prophet must have collaborated to produce the Deuteronomic code. If so, the mixture of the two currents became still more intimate when they embodied themselves in a single personality. Ezekiel's vision of the restored community hardly reads as if it could have been intended as a literal programme. Even those who reverenced his teaching replaced its impracticable letter by other codifications of priestly usage. But, in general tone and not a few details, Ezekiel appears as the inspirer of the new legal temper, preoccupied with sin and defilement and with ritual purgations. A greater than he, the unknown prophet of Isaiah xl-lv, had also spoken words of hope, among which ritualism played no part. But the Deutero-Isaiah was to find his textit{god in Christianity. Ezekiel was the man of the nearer future, the father or at least the grandfather of Judaism. The fir...